Tried the demo for Star Overdrive (since it’s fucking huge and is taking up a big chunk of my SSD), a game that’s been shown once or twice on some of the Nintendo Directs and that I thought kinda looked like shit.
Turns out the looking-like-shit aspect is probably due to trying to do a gigantic open world game on the Switch, so I can say that it’s actually got a pretty clean and colorful look on PC.
The downside is that it’s not that much fun. It’s doing some of the recent Zelda gravity stuff and whatnot with abilities you can get, but not in any real meaningful or interesting way. Combat feels real chunky and clunky. And that big ass world feels like it’s huge if only so you’ve got dune peaks and stuff to do tricks off of on your hoverboard.
Good effort, I guess! It will be someone’s favorite game, probably! Just not for me, sorry.
Edit: The demo for Void Breaker is really cool, as a first person run based sort of thing. I didn’t care much for what I played of Metal Eden, which is doing a sort of similar thing.
Hell is Us Demo: I’ve had my eye on this one since it showed looked like some sort of weird Death Stranding Soulslike from its initial trailers. I am also for any game with Curly Hair Representation (it’s definitely here, dude has Caesar hair) and “villains with big ass goiter necks,” so I gave it a shot.
It’s…not at all what I expected! I mean I guess it’s a little Souls-y, but it’s really cool, it looks great, combat is…maybe it gets better as you progress, but it’s fine.
Mostly here for the whole design ethos of “we’re not going to put any hints or objective markers or anything anywhere, and no map or minimap, just figure it out.” As someone with acute Ubisoft poisoning, this is refreshing.
I thought I was going crazy but I think VOID/BREAKER and Morbid Metal are the same game. I mean they’re not, but…VOID/BREAKER is a futuristic run-based FPS where an AI has you locked into servitude and the dead remnants of a past runner hooked into the system tries to break you free from the lies, and Morbid Metal is…a futuristic run-based action game where an AI has you locked into servitude and there’s a voice telling you that you can break free from it.
I forgot the name of the FPS that’s being published by Deep Silver that I played the demo of this morning that’s more or less like this, too.
I really oughta combine my posts, but the demo for Holstin is cool as hell. I dunno if it’s doing what Signalis did (I haven’t played that yet…), but it’s a very, uh, weird top-down isometric survival horror game that looks 2D at first blush, but whenever you use a gun it pulls back into an RE4 style aiming mode.
Pretty sure it’s Polish, at least what they’re speaking, but I gotta imagine it’s Polish as hell in writing, too. The characters in this slime-filled town of zombie psychos are all just super fucking weird, it’s great.
Edit: I will say that while the shooting is cool, the melee feels damn near unusable. You gotta charge your attacks, and at least in the case of the crowbar, it takes a lot longer to charge than it takes a zombie to swipe you. You also can’t move or dodge while charging a swing. Means you gotta waste a lot of bullets…there’s a guy who will sell you more for the cigarettes you find everywhere, but…
learning new words from final fantasy games for literal decades now…
me and my roommate havebeen playing ff7 remake on our ps4 in our living room at an intensely slow pace… it’s a very weird but enjoyable experience idk.
for one thing this basically feels like one of the most expensive to produce videogames ever and large parts of it seem to be in service of the cloud-tifa-aerith love triangle… this game is polyamorous as fuck… they need to let you play this as girl cloud all the way through…
also the strange experience of playing something that seems to be meta-sequel to final fantasy 7 as someone who has not played the entire original ff7 game alongside someone who has not played it at all… which maybe feels like the least advisable part of this narrative, instead of just making a game with a different plot… did the eva remake series do this too? i didnt watch them lol
this entire thing seems incredibly confusing to someone who doesnt already have hundreds of hours logged on 90s jrpgs…
Replaying Resident Evil Revelations 2, which still has no business being as solid as it is. Fighting an optional boss left me with absolutely zero ammo, which is a good, satisfying feeling; I only wish item distribution were static and not dynamic, as the latter means it’s not long until you have at least some bullets. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to fully load Claire’s magnum, which isn’t nothing.
Storywise, it’s the closest Resident Evil has been to being fanfic of itself, bringing together elements from past games (especially 5 and 6) in a way that feels very unlike the series post-Raccoon City. It’s also the one Resident Evil that I feel has actually managed to have a proper story, with themes, evolving characters, and interactions with resonance. While none of these are essential for Resident Evil, it’s good to have at least once in a while.
So I played Vanquish for the first time (PS4 remaster) and it has been a blast. Super fun, perfect difficulty for me (on normal), great pacing, right length. I wish there were more games like it.
One of these days I need to see someone that likes Vanquish play it because I’ve played through it at least 3 times (short game) trying to understand it.
My reason for disliking it is Melee is a last ditch solution that leaves you vunerable.
I thought I was gonna hate vanquish but that fucking slide
I sent veronica a care package before we were dating of a bunch of stuff including a pack of vanquish candy pre-order cigarettes and I bet that’s what made her like me
I enjoy Vanquish on principle but it’s a few tweaks away from nailing it. Like rudie, I agree the melee needs some retouches like the different attacks depending on equiped gun should have different boost bar costs instead of a de facto deplete. The story is vapid but not quite vapid enough to really be fun. Just a little less of the 24/COD self serious would’ve helped. Ammo Management and Gun upgrades are just a UX nightmare. Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t for keeping an ammo stock pile for a gun you want to get better.
i’ve been continuing to play doom 2 voxel doom… i really like this experience in part because it feels so different from where the mainstream of the FPS is now
dungeon crawler FPSing, FPSing with dodgeable projectiles that move slower than the player character (there are some maps here where you’re having like at least 80s shmup amounts of projectiles tossed at you), voxel graphics…
the voxel thing is so cool to me! and such a delightful way to bridge 3D graphics (but notably not 3D polygon graphics) and 2D sprites imo… a fantasy project for me at this point might be something like a fighting game with neo geo or cps2/3 sprites translated to voxel graphics.
I never touched melee in Vanquish so it’s surprising to see that’s a common criticism. The cover mechanics and the slide reinforced for me the idea that you were supposed to keep your distance from enemies, that the tension of the game was picking them off before they could swarm your position (most vividly demonstrated in the underground tunnel level), and that if they did overwhelm you the slide offered a quick retreat to other cover.
Yeah I played through all of Vanquish and I don’t feel like me and it ever got on the same page. My gut feeling is that playing the game “wrong” (as a mediocre cover shooter) works about as well as playing the game as intended (sliding around all the time) until one theoretically masters the latter, but if that mastery never comes throughout an entire playthrough of the game then you’re kinda screwed. I don’t think I ever got better than mediocre at handling the overheating system.
It is actually one of my go-to examples for a personal thing I call “time to check progress”. If I check out how many more stages a game has early on (I believe it was in the second or third section in Vanquish) then I am almost certainly heading towards a disappointing experience with something.
TBF it is also a Platinum game and the next game they release that isn’t overrated by a large section of the gaming public will be the first >_>
